Structural and thermodynamic properties of a multicomponent freely jointed hard sphere multi-Yukawa chain fluid

Abstract

The product-reactant Ornstein-Zernike approach, represented by the polymer mean-spherical approximation (PMSA), is utilized to describe the structure and thermodynamic properties of the fluid of Yukawa hard sphere chain molecules. An analytical solution of the PMSA for the most general case of the multicomponent freely jointed hard sphere multi-Yukawa chain fluid is presented. As in the case of the regular MSA for the hard sphere Yukawa fluid, the problem is reduced to the solution of a set of nonlinear algebraic equations in the general case, and to a single equation in the case of the factorizable Yukawa potential coefficients. Closed form analytical expressions are presented for the contact values of the monomer-monomer radial distribution function, structure factors, internal energy, Helmholtz free energy, chemical potentials and pressure in terms of the quantities, which follows directly from the PMSA solution. By way of illustration, several different versions of the hard sphere Yukawa chain model are considered, represented by one-Yukawa chains of length m, where m = 2, 4, 8, 16. To validate the accuracy of the present theory, Monte Carlo simulations were carried out and the results are compared systematically with the theoretical results for the structure and thermodynamic properties of the system at hand. In general it is found that the theory performs very well, thus providing an analytical route to the equilibrium properties of a well defined model for chain fluids.